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Monday, May 19, 2008

Charlie Wilson's War

I recently watched Charlie Wilson's War and while being a student of International Affairs, I had at least some recollection of why the Soviets invaded. However, the movie popularized an actual policy in America at the time, containment, the United States would fight "auxiliary wars" or periferal wars such as those in the Congo, Vietnam, Cambodia and Afghanistan. These so-called military skirmishes served as a mechanism fend off a Soviet expansionist tendencies and therefore stop the spread of communism and stick to our beloved policy of containment. However, s Charlie Wilson's War demonstrates some of those wars were not as glorious and covertly fought as the bleeding hart epic blockbuster movie portrays...ie Vietnam.

However, being a student of International Affairs, where a focus on different facets of the Cold War is about 87% of the curriculum advanced graduate classes to 101 classes, my knowledge level runs deep, however, it exists in academia...People like my parents who grew up during the Cold War, and my grandparents who fought in WWII saw the change in world wide politics, I can only look back through college level courses and political interest books

However, my fleeting desire to pursue such a profound education has led to a personal interest is the Mujahideen and other guerrilla resistances and their successes and/or failures in the aforementioned auxiliary (axillary?) wars. It is true that the CIA led covert operations to secretly fund the Mujahideen and supply them with Russian bazookas to shoot down the helicopters, but what else was on the table. How involved was the CIA, and how effective were they? It just goes to show that a government can really start a war to achieve subsequently entirely different results, that bare no meaning on the country at hand...it its funny to see now that as everyone mentioned that we supplied Osama bin Laden with the power to stop the Russians, and now he cultivates islamic fundamentalism to continue fighting for his original mission...which is not to attack the US, but to overthrow the Saudi regime...however, in order to do so, he must prove himself by taking down the West...

Here is a clip I found on youtube.com that demonstrates a potential vision at the CNN Effect and how they can provoke and persuade the public in order to gain votes and look good politically...